Uptown Conversation

The New Jazz Studies

Robert O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231508360
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define—it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed Jazz Cadence of American Culture, these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing—such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscott's autobiography Songs of the Unsung —share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

part 1

GEORGE LIPSITZ

Songs of the Unsung:

The Darby Hicks History of Jazz

Nobody agrees on anything about jazz (except that it survived beautifully and blossomed), but everybody thinks they know all about it, anywhere in the world. There is an interesting ownership of jazz.

—Toni Morrison

Beware of the prevailing view of “jazz” as some kind of history lesson that you have to sit through because it’s good for you…. Understand that this is a living art form whose most esteemed practitioners are continually evolving and engaging with the world around them.

—Vijay Iyer

They get to think in a memory kind of way about all this Jazz; but these people don’t seem to know it’s more than a memory thing. They don’t seem to know it’s happening right here where they’re listening to it, just as much as it ever did in memory.

—Sidney Bechet

n

New members of Harlan Leonard’s Territory jazz band in the 1940s began to hear about Darby Hicks as soon as they were hired. None of them recognized his name, but evidently the musicians in their new band knew him well. “Oh yes, I heard about you,” a band veteran would say upon being introduced to the new recruit, “Darby Hicks told me that you can’t play a lick.” If a musician failed to hit a high note or adjust to a key change, someone would always say, “Darby Hicks would have nailed that.” Even worse, Darby Hicks seemed to know them. Senior members of the band would pull newcomers aside and confide to them, “Darby Hicks was talking about you last night, man. He was saying some terrible things about you, and about your sister, and about your mother, and even about your grandmother too.” At this point the initiate often reached the breaking point and exploded in anger, vowing to settle things with Darby Hicks directly by challenging him to a fight.

Darby Hicks did not exist. The musicians made up a name they could use to tease newcomers, to initiate them into the band with an in-joke. Eventually the new band members would become insiders and play the same trick on those who joined the aggregation after them. The “Darby Hicks” story worked because musicians are competitive, proud, and sensitive to peer pressure, because reputations have professional and personal consequences. The story served a disciplinary function for the band as well, placing newcomers on notice that they were being watched, evaluated, and judged. Whatever the new band members thought of their own talent when they entered the band, they soon learned that they had not measured up to the standards of Darby Hicks. Whatever music they were about to play did not matter, because it could never be as good as the music Darby Hicks had already played.¹

Ken Burns’s film Jazz has more than a little of Darby Hicks in it, although the name is never mentioned. Its opening and establishing shot presents the high-rise buildings of New York City’s skyline illuminated at night during the 1920s as the sounds of automobile horns transform into the sounds of the brass horns of a jazz ensemble. This opening serves to prefigure a connection between black music and modernity as a central focus of the film. A second connection becomes evident immediately as Wynton Marsalis’s voice provides a sound bridge to a close-up of his face. Marsalis declares, “Jazz objectifies America,” and then explains that jazz music is something that can tell us who “we” are. The trumpet virtuoso then identifies collective improvisation as jazz’s core concept and key achievement. He notes that Bach improvised while playing his own compositions on the keyboard, but relegates that accomplishment to a secondary level because Bach did not improvise with other musicians as jazz artists must do. Thus, in rapid order in its first three scenes, Jazz (the film) links jazz (the music) to three key signifiers: modernity, America, and the apex of artistic genius.

The opening scenes of Jazz brilliantly encapsulate much of what follows during more than twenty hours of film stretched over ten episodes. Burns and his fellow filmmakers compress the infinitely diverse and plural practices that make up the world of jazz into one time—modernity, one place—“America,” and one subjectivity—the heroic artist who turns adversity and alienation into aesthetic triumph. As the opening shots of the New York skyline suggest, the film depicts jazz as the quintessential creation of modernity, an art form shaped by the technological and social complexities of the twentieth-century city.

A linear developmental narrative traces the journey of jazz across space, from its origins in the rural areas of the southern U.S. and Europe to the racially mixed and ethnically diverse cities of the twentieth century. The same developmental narrative governs the growth of jazz’s key styles from the foundational ensemble style pioneered by Dixieland innovators in New Orleans during the 1910s and 1920s to the section-playing, written arrangements, powerful sounds, and rhythms of swing bands in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York during the 1930s, to ultimate fulfillment in the sophisticated styles of bebop players in New York and Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. The film presents jazz as an art form that emerged from urbanization and industrialization, that fused folk forms with modern improvisation, and that echoed the upheavals of modernity with artistry oriented toward originality and innovation. In this narrative, jazz had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Jazz music not only has its designated proper time in this film, but it also occupies a discrete physical space: the geographic and juridical boundaries of the United States of America. Jazz music’s importance in this film comes from its identity as the most important art form to originate in the United States, from its value as a metaphorical representation of the tensions between diversity and unity that define “American” society. When Wynton Marsalis begins the film proclaiming that “jazz objectifies America” and that it can tell us who “we” are, the audience is being interpellated as national subjects, as “Americans.” But as Jazz proceeds, we see that Marsalis’s comments mean even more, that in this film jazz has metonymic rather than merely metaphorical significance. It not only reflects the nation, it somehow constitutes it. In this film, the story of jazz is also the story of America. The ability of black and white jazz musicians to blend European and African musical traditions into a new synthesis despite the rigidly racist and segregated nature of the nation’s social (and musical) institutions is what makes jazz music quintessentially American.

As a means of staking a claim by blacks for inclusion in the celebratory nationalism of the American nation that has routinely excluded them, this narrative strategy makes sense. It urges white nationalists to acknowledge the importance of black people to the national project, while allowing blacks to see themselves as key contributors to a project in which all Americans presumably take pride. In addition, Jazz pays homage to artists who deserve to be honored while it recalls a history that very much needs to be told. Yet by telling the story as a narrative about modern time and American space, the film necessarily, and regrettably, occludes other temporal and spatial dimensions of jazz that also need to be illuminated.

The privileged time of modernity and the privileged space of America come together in Jazz to draw attention to a privileged social subject: the heroic creative artist. Louis Armstrong serves as the anchor of this project, the prototypical genius who played better (louder, higher, longer) than anyone else and whose creative innovations influenced everyone else. The film’s narrative voices use the word genius again and again, frequently by connecting Armstrong, Ellington, or Parker to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or some other recognized genius of the classical canon.

In this formulation, each instrument has its own history and its own exemplary performer. Louis Armstrong perfects the possibilities of the trumpet. Lester Young and Charlie Parker define the limits of artistry on the tenor saxophone. Multi-instrumentalism is only a footnote to this story. Yet in the lives of individual musicians a dialogic history of moving from one instrument to another has often led to innovations undreamed of by single instrument players. Lionel Hampton and Lester Young explored scales extensively when they took up melodic instruments (vibes and saxophones) because they started out as drummers who had not had to think very much about harmony and melody. Under the tutelage of his father, Young learned to play clarinet, piano, flute, and piccolo. The unique sounds that Lester Young coaxed out of the tenor owed much to his previous playing on the C Melody and alto saxophones.²

Within the heroic narrative the particularities of black experience and American white supremacy serve as little more than dramatic background for the emergence of individuals who turn adversity into aesthetic perfection through their art. Wynton Marsalis describes the triumphs over adversity by Armstrong and the other geniuses of jazz as part of a universal process that takes place in all societies. Consequently, for Marsalis, racism’s relationship to jazz is only as the historically specific obstacle to genius that these artists faced, more part of a general pattern than a constitutive force. “It happened to be racism,” in this case Marsalis observes, “but it is always something.”

The narrative strategies deployed by the producers of Jazz are understandable, logical, and part of a long and honorable tradition. They reflect the efforts by Houston Baker and Paul Gilroy to claim a central place for African Americans in the history of modernism. They echo the insistence of Albert Murray on “the inescapably mulatto” character of “American” culture and on the inalienable contributions by blacks to the national narrative. They continue the claims made by Billy Taylor, Grover Sales, Reginald Buckner, and many others for the canonization of jazz as “America’s classical music.” Yet, like any historical narrative, the evidence and arguments advanced in Jazz are partial, perspectival, and interested. In telling its own truths about time, place, and subjectivity, the film directs our attention away from the many other temporalities, spaces, and subject positions that are central to the story of jazz.

It is not incorrect to view jazz as an exemplary modernist creation of the twentieth-century city, but doing so suppresses other temporalities and spaces equally responsible for the art. The migrant to the city who fashions a new art out of alienation is a recurrent story in the history of modernism, but to tell the story that way privileges the community of artistic practices that migrants create in the city over the community of shared historical experience they leave behind and, in some cases, even bring with them to the metropolis. When Lee Young moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans, Mutt Carey took him into his band without an audition because he already had a long history with the Young family that included walking Lee Young to grade school when they both lived in New Orleans.³ Black migrants to urban areas have rarely been afforded the luxury of cutting off contact with their previous places of residence. Black urban life has always entailed secondary migrations from regional gateway cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta to large metropolitan centers like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Survival strategies often required moving back and forth between cities, maintaining contacts with family and friends in the countryside, using the dispersal of the black population as a way to counter shortages of opportunities and resources in any one place.⁴

In the version of modernity described in Jazz, art becomes a specialized and autonomous activity detached from tradition, something created by alienated individuals rather than historical communities. Modernist aesthetics place the value of a work of art in the work itself, not in the broader social relations and practices that shape artistic creation and reception. The aestheticization of alienation is seen as an end in itself, as an episode in the history of art rather than as an individual and collective strategy for living better in the world by calling new realities into being through performance.

This celebration of modernism masks the creative tensions in black culture between modernity and tradition. As Farah Jasmine Griffin explains in her brilliant analysis of the African American “migration narrative,” black artists’ enthusiasm for modernity has often been tempered by the pull of the past, by the power of “talkative ancestors” warning against a form of freedom based upon detachment from tradition. The honor that elite white artists and critics reserve for high modernism understandably generates a desire among African Americans to celebrate the dynamic presence of African Americans within it. But this prestige comes at a high price when it diverts attention away ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introductory Notes
• Part 1
• Part 2
• List of Contributors
• Index